The top, free, press release distribution sites

— A great article, wrtten by my friend Phil Davies, BigNews.biz ; Enjoy! —

For many PR professionals “free” press release distribution sites seem to instill a great deal of loathing. They are written off as a waste of time and generally not considered to be a viable way to distribute press releases.

The problem was I kept seeing press releases from these free press release sites showing up in page 1 Google search results and page 1 on Google News. In some cases beating out results from major media outlets.

I wanted to find out for myself what was going on, so over the past 5 years, I’ve registered and posted to hundreds of these sites, then evaluated the results. Hey, everyone needs a hobby 🙂

What I found was really interesting. Some of these sites are quite good, offer some very interesting features and can have a very dramatic impact on the distribution of your press releases. I also found that a large number of these services are just plain bad.

So, I put together a list of what I consider to be the better quality sites and I’ve been updating it since June of 2008. The latest update just went up today. You can find the updated list online here:
http://www.bignews.biz/blog/?p=6

The list is based on the following criteria:

1. Page Rank – What is the Google page rank of the site? I’m only listing free PR sites that have a page rank of 4/10 or higher. You can use a service like http://www.prchecker.info/ to determine Google page rank.
2. Google News – Are most of the press releases that are published by the site picked up by Google news? To find out if a PR distribution site is getting their content indexed by Google news, go to Google News and do a search for “site:sitename.com”. This will show all of the stories by that site that have been indexed by Google News. As an example, a search for all press releases for the free PR site BigNews.biz, would look like this “site:BigNews.biz”
3. Traffic – Does the free press release site get any traffic? For this list we used Alexa.com to check traffic. You will have to set your own standard for what you feel is acceptable. For this list, I’m using any site that is ranked above or around 50,000 by Alexa.
4. Cost – For this list we are looking for sites that are primarily free. However, they may offer additional premium services for a fee.
5. Do they actually post submitted releases? This may seem rather odd, but I’ve found that even when I post a good quality release to a site and follow their directions, the site may not publish the release. So I’ve also eliminated sites where this has been a reoccurring problem.

So what are some of the benefits you will get from using these free press release distribution services?

1. Daily reports on traffic to each release
2. Image included with release
3. High pagerank and SEO for your release
4. Backlinks from your release to your site
5. Same day distribution
6. Release pushed to Google news as well as social media sites like twitter, facebook, Yahoo! Buzz and others..
7. Automatically ping sites such as eblogs.com Blo.gs, Technorati, Feed Burner, Syndic8, NewsGator, My Yahoo!, PubSub.com, Blogdigger, BlogRolling, BlogStreet, Moreover, Weblogalot, Icerocket, News Is Free, Topic Exchange, Google Blog Search, Spinn3r, Bloglines, AideRSS, SkyGrid, Bitacoras. with your release.
8. Organic traffic from these PR sites to your release. The sites listed are all ranked in the top 50,000 (according to Alexa)

The bottom line is there are some solid benefits to using these free services. Check out the list and give them a try at: http://www.bignews.biz/blog/?p=6

Full disclosure – I do run the BigNews.biz site and develop software for press release and news distribution sites. I’m not advocating the use of my site, (The above mentioned list is mostly competitors) Questions? drop me an email at Phil@Bignews.biz

Regards,
Phil Davies
BigNews.biz LLC